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The Evolution of the Fractured Quilt

Way back in May of 2014, I tried to start the quilt "Fractured" from Kathy Doughty's book, Making Quilts. I posted on the blog here about how I was stuck and unsure if I had chosen the right fabrics to use together.

Here is a pic of my original plan:

I had decided to use some Kaffe Fasset fabrics mixed with a text print. While I liked the idea, it felt like it wasn't quite working for me. This quilt feels like it should be exuberant and I think the text print reads too much as gray and toned down the exuberance. It might have worked better if it were a type of block where less of the text print were visible.

When I looked at quilts I liked made from this pattern, they were in warmer colors and they were "louder" in their fabric selection. I talked it over with my friend Cynthia and that helped me move in a direction I was happier with.

I decided that all the blocks would have a purple fabric and each ring of blocks would be a different color: first yellow/purple, then orange/purple, followed by red/purple.

I made it as far as you see below: 12 blocks in the yellow section. Then I considered cutting out some of this section to make the quilt smaller because the final size is huge and would be difficult for me to quilt on my machine. While I debated this, the quilt stalled, then I got busy with work and Fancy Forest and it has been sitting quite some time.

After finishing Fancy Forest, I got this quilt back on the design wall. I decided to keep the original size because I think the design will look better as a rectangle than a square. Since it would be difficult to quilt on my domestic machine, I have decided to try big stitch quilting it with perle cotton when it is finished.

I swapped out a couple of the yellow blocks that I did not think worked very well and started adding the orange blocks to the next round of the rectangle.

The more blocks I added, the more exciting it got. Some of the fabrics I chose seemed too red orange for this round so I removed a few and tried to use more yellow orange.

Once I had them all up on the wall, I took a photo. It showed me that I had to remove some of the yellow orange and add back in the red orange. It is funny how a photo allows you to focus your vision in a way that it is hard to do with just your own eye.

Here is what I hope will be the final layout of the orange round.

I am now starting the final round: 26 blocks of red. It is exciting to see this quilt finally coming together!